Kristen Stewart’s in-depth interview reveals why she views ‘Twilight’ as a queer movie

Oscar-nominated actress Kristen Stewart has been in the limelight since she was a pre-pubescent, starring opposite Jodie Foster in Panic Room before hitting the big time with her star-making role in the Twilight series. During that time, Kristen was in a very public relationship with her co-star Robert Pattinson, but as that relationship dissolved before the paparazzi Kristen eventually found her footing to come out as openly queer during her 2017 SNL hosting stint, to much applause.

Now, in a new interview, the Spencer star is reflecting on her formative years in the Twilight series, and how she finds the movies, and books that inspired them, to be coded quite obviously as queer.

Speaking with Variety about her career trajectory and actually looking at her body of work when the public and the media was still assuming she was straight, she tells the outlet that only now she can see Twilight as a queer movie.  “I can only see it now,” she says. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie.”

She continues, “I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”

She goes on to say that her decision to live as an openly queer woman has made her a role model in the community. “Every single woman that I’ve ever met in my whole life who ever kissed a girl in college is like, ‘Yeah, I mean, me too.’ I’m constantly joking with my girlfriend. I’ll be sitting there and be like, ‘She’s gay too. Everyone’s gay.’”

Elsewhere in the interview, she speaks about going further back than Twilight to her first major role in Panic Room opposite another queer icon Jodie Foster, pointing out that she can see the queer coding in her performance even at such a young age.

“I was already going like, ‘Don’t f**k with me,’” she tells the outlet. “I was gay.”

Jodie Foster also spoke to the outlet, dove-tailing off of that revelation, noting, “There’s so much that you bring to a role that’s conscious, that’s choreographed, that you thought about. And then there are things that you’re working with that are entirely unconscious, that you won’t really understand until years later, or maybe never.”

While her Twilight costars Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner werntervieweden’t i for this Variety feature, they both have shared in the past how they view the series now after so many years have passed and its contribution to pop culture.

"It's not even cool to be a hater anymore," Pattinson said in 2022 of the initial backlash to the Twilight series during an interview about The Batman alongside Zoe Kravitz

"That's so 2010," he added.

As for Lautner, he admitted in 2023 that initially he resented the insane amount of attention and media frenzy caused by the series, but these days, he feels nothing but gratitude.

“I was always incredibly thankful, and feel super blessed for what it brought me, but maybe there was a little bit of, like, resentment deep in there going like, ‘I wish I could have just experienced this part of normalcy,'” he said.  “Now, I wouldn’t change it. But I think it needed the growth to get to that place.”